Synopsis
Ethnicizing Europe focuses on the dynamics of interethnic violence in Europe between the two world wars. The new international system that was enshrined by the Versailles peace treaties after World War I did not bring stability to East-Central Europe. Rather, it resulted in a host of conditions like self-determination, international oversight, revolutionary political ideas, and democratic processes, which eventually gave new meaning to already established conflicts, as well as igniting new conflicts in the region. This book opens with a discussion of the theoretical scholarship on ethnicity before proceeding to specific case studies investigating the different ways in which ethnicity was enacted and contested during a period of European transformation, focusing mostly on ethnically heterogeneous locales. Rather than concentrating on either political violence or ethnonationalism, this collection brings these two literatures together to show how ethnicization, the legal concepts of citizenship, and violence were intertwined in post-Versailles Europe, not only shaping the period between the wars, but also the Europe we know today. The book concludes with an afterword by Tara Zahra, which expands this perspective to the wider transatlantic region.
Publication of this title is made possible with support from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.
About the Authors
Éva Kovács is a sociologist, deputy director of Academic Affairs at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, and a research professor at the Centre for Social Sciences/Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence in Budapest. Her research fields include the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, research on memory and remembrance, and Jewish identity in Hungary. She is the author or editor of fifteen books and numerous articles in scholarly journals, and she has cocurated exhibitions in Budapest, Berlin, Bratislava, Krems, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw. She is the founder of the audiovisual archive “Voices of the Twentieth Century” in Budapest and the editor-in-chief of S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.
Raul Cârstocea is assistant professor in twentieth-century European history at Maynooth University in Ireland. His research interests focus on anti-Semitism, fascism, nationalism, the Holocaust, and more broadly on state formation and nation-building processes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, and their consequences for minority groups. He is coeditor of the Modern History of Politics and Violence book series at Bloomsbury and vice-chair of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Observatory on History Teaching in Europe at the Council of Europe. He is also a member of the editorial team of S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation.
Gábor Egry is a historian, doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and director-general of the Institute of Political History in Budapest. His research interests include nationalism, everyday ethnicity, politics of identity, politics of memory, and economic history in modern East-Central Europe. He is the author of five books and has published articles in the European Review of History, Slavic Review, Hungarian Historical Review, and Südost-Forschungen. Between 2018 and 2023, he was the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Nepostrans, which was a comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe.
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